Gadgetory

you probably already saw our video where we posted some pretty high scores in times 5 extreme by using an ice bucket and chilling the radiator of our GPU and CPU first time we've ever done that so the process to get here was really long we're gonna use the system one more time in a live stream and that will be today October 5th at 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time so make sure you check back for that stream if you want to see this thing in action one more time before we start tearing it down but this video will show you the build up process and all of the pain that we went through to get it working it was a first-time experience for us learning how to insulate cards using tricks from extreme overclockers like build Zoid so that we could get the cards in a state where we weren't concerned about condensation forming from the lower than ambient cooling solution stuff like that so it's a really interesting process if you want to check it out but otherwise you can see it in action again in the stream assuming the stream hasn't already ended by the time this is seen by you before that this video is brought to you by it the NZXT e series power supplies the e series PS use our high end power supplies with real time digital voltage and temperature monitoring per rail wattage measurements and data logging functionality for power usage the e series PSU is also come with a 10 year warranty all the way down to the 500 watt unit and they run fully modular and with silent fan operating modes learn more at the link below so this is the point where I'm gonna have to interrupt my whole review cycle and scheduling just to respond to J 1 mr. J is 2 cents because when he beat our score on times by extreme he posted a number that was about a hundred points higher and we beat that but and this was we didn't make a video about it yet so I beat that score God 100 points higher and the changes I made to the bench to do that involved actually there were no changes it was just skill so with just about 8 hours of my time tuning timings and the clocks and voltages and memory straps and everything learning a lot about that was he process we're able to get up and beat J's score but then he posted another one he's beaten us heavily in graphic score right now which is what's getting I'm the huge jumping tse total points because time spy extreme really cares about graphics we're way behind in graphics for two reasons the primary of which is a thermal constraint so we've been running this EVGA actually ultra for our primary card which is a fine card but it's not water-cooled and J at this point is on water cooling and up before this point when he beat us by a hundred points and then I responded and beat that with just skill he beat our score then by using an AC unit hooked up to a duct pointed into a cardboard box which he lives in and then cooled his entire overclocking system that way we are going to respond by I guess putting water blocks on these things even though it's kind of inconvenient but hopefully there's a one-shot deal so we're gonna put water blocks on at least one card the hybrid card we have sorry I said there are two reasons that he's way ahead of us one is the thermal constraint that's big on these Nvidia cards if you can get down to like 40 degrees Celsius that's another voltage step-down you increase your clock 7:13 a even 20 megahertz a big deal there and we are at sixty plus on this card and then about I want to say about 45 on the hybrid card so we have a lot of headroom there we can gain by shaving 20 degrees off with water and then the next reason we're a bit behind is because of our founders addition card that we're using for the secondary card it only offsets memory by we got up to nine thirty megahertz found a memory strap there so we four four clocks we're kind of limited on that one compared to the partner cards but we have a solution for that as well so hopefully avoiding doing shot mods today but we do have a plan for that as well if it comes down to it for now though let's get into the waterblock build up so first of all huge shout out to our patreon backer Richie who sent over this pile of stuff water cooling stuff Jay has a major leg up on us there and you'll see where that comes in later but so we don't we don't have years of liquid cooling parts like he does so we had one of our patreon backers who was also competing on the x bar x buy listings send us some of his and he's competing for a single card Titan V score but we're going duel card so all right let's take this thing apart and get a water block on it and then we can go from there on what happens next we really need to get that efi card out of the equation it's a major major bottleneck at this point and the EVGA card has been a bit of a crutch for it and the process of removing this thing we've learned EVGA double stacked their own pads a new VG I went crazy with their old pads after a CX and icx and everything this is going a little fart she'd think anyway that's removed so spacing was not perfect for that so we are not gonna bother Reaper for seeing the base plate could cut it to size but I think Jade did that and that's boring so we're gonna do something more unique all right so EVGA put a ton of thermal paste in here we're just gonna leave all the stuff on the sides there are small SM DS in there not generally a good idea to dig with fingernails around those and it's not gonna hurt anything if anything might help marginally so we'll leave that there now we need to just see will this ek block fit like I want it to well this ek block felt like I wanted to and we're gonna need here's another problem because we're in sli we're gonna need 90 degree fittings on this otherwise no trouble okay okay that'll work barely very barely fell very barely work okay we're just gonna need to run 90 degree fittings on here to get the tubes away from the other card so that we can still fit them in the SLI I think we should be good so gonna mount this and some small memory heat sinks the memory just for the record when we were testing our hybrid card with the memory and the VR I'm exactly the same PCB even testing it the hottest module was still like 55 degrees even with a heavy overclock and that's because we had so much airflow on it this card will still have a lot of airflow but it's gonna be the middle so I will be adding some memory heatsinks on it just to improve efficiency a bit it doesn't need to be ice-cold Jay's been pushing his vrm and everything else really low in thermals and we're not we're just gonna focus on the core here and getting everything else reasonable so I think we're gonna do the same thing as the hybrid stick that through one side put the knot down on the other that should be all there is to this and getting some thermal paste on here hang on wait wait wait let me let me imitate the comments hang on that's way too much they're all pasted Steve that's way too much they're all pasted okay okay we got one half the counts hang on hang on let me get the other half we need a lot more of this okay maybe it may be a little more a little just on the cheeks ah Steve that's not enough thermal paste the the group saying that there's too much they're all based the the former we have found that actually it's irrelevant and now on a GPU is way better to have more in fact I'd like to have a bit more in the middle there but whatever mmm maybe a little more maybe just for the contours we'll do a little more or maybe not damnit I need to get a skinnier screw maybe I should what was it Jay did that one time to get to get through the motherboard maybe I should just do what Jay did that one time where's the do you think I should just do it Jay did dammit these Rock nuts I think I don't know why I would have an uneven I'm out so all the stores are closed because it's too late and we film too late nothing's ever open so if you wonder why would you janky thin sometimes that's largely why but I don't have the right size not have fun with that comment you bastard I've got plenty of locking ones so I show the screw through it let's see if we can get it to work yes so when you need a now I'm not walking not apparently you just drill through it now no it's not gonna be as strong as the others but I don't know I'll replace it tomorrow when the stores are opening for something for now I just want to get this thing built set that aside as the special one now we need some heat sinks for the memory because so this vrm like we discussed in the previous content and and build Zoids analysis it's it's fine like this can run without anything except for air the ACS vrm can run probably without even much air but it's fine so we really don't need to do much here other than get some airflow on it but we are going to get some heat sinks on the memory because it's getting hot we're pushing it kind of hard and it also does not need it but it will reduce the amount of air flow we need in a given area so that will be nice we can kind of take it easier on the airflow front be very interesting also completely unnecessary okay so maybe we'll come back to the waterblock on the BRM idea later if we really need it but I just realized is I need to spread some eraser on the PCB there is a reason for this this isn't this isn't just to see anyone thinks I'm going crazy so we're actually gonna pull that block back off for a second probably the best idea to do that yeah okay all right so unfortunately we're doing some stuff but it's something gonna be smarter to do it this way so I'm just gonna spread some of this kneadable eraser all over the service surface of this and that is to protect us from short circuits in the event of condensation okay so we've coated this thing in kneadable art eraser and that's going to be for condensation and serious water buildup and drip around the block as it goes below ambient temperature which is something we'll be showing more later maybe a stream or something like that and so that's done now I need to do I'm just I decided we're all the things off we're just gonna throw these on so for that I am going to be using some of this which is just a thermal tape it's it is thermally conductive and it's sticky so it's kind of like an extremely thin thermal pad in a lot of ways we're just going to use this on the memory and then we're going to connect that to our heat sinks this is awful this is so bad that's the trick that's it all right so the trick I'm going to use here cuz it's extremely sticky and hard to work with the stuff is place the pieces I want on the small one for now and then I'll start peeling it and cut them as it goes I have a plan here too involving multiple heat sinks on the middle ones hey okay okay so we got the vram plates down heatsinks took a long time to attach them I'm at a loss for words and we're gonna go with probably air cooling for the BRM I guess maybe I don't know probably air cooling then we're gonna use that that good stuff that kingpin cooling thermal paste which is on kingpins website and it's also blue and it's like the only paste that's blue that's that's not really the best reason to use it does it still though it still reeks nice okay cool GPUs better have too much because if you're not covering a part it's a concern but also it annoys the commenters and further this thing's gonna wiggle around while I'm applying it so that's actually a valid reason all right we should be good there okay all right so man that took a long time so we have heat sinks for our memory we're gonna blast it with air flow without probably hopefully without causing too much condensation to drip down that's still a major concern but you need to figure that out later and then probably should have even put more in there more play-doh in there but the vrm for now we're gonna go with air and see what happens and then if it's no good we'll put a water block on it but I think that that'll wrap this card so now it's it's on to the next one whichever that may be but we'll test this one first with the hybrid that we have already just for some voice over here this is the part where we started insulating things it took a long time so for this what we did was blue shop towel on everything and the ultimate goal is to stop air from hitting stuff but if air does happen to hit something then hopefully the shop towel catches it and hopefully the needa bowl eraser under it will also prevent any drip edge from hitting PCBs or circuits or anything like that so this was a pretty long process we also the backside because the backside runs below ambient and that's the problem for condensation of course this was done for both our EVGA XE ultra and our asus strix cards and then we also used a captain tape that's that yellow tape you see along the outer edges of the GPU to cover all the small SMDs that surround it because water will form on the cold plate down there if air can get in and it will so we lined to the outside of the GPU just in case with some non conductive tape and that more or less shows the rest of the build-up process so at this point it was just a matter of getting everything working testing it getting fans on it all that stuff and then posting the scores you eventually saw which were twelve thousand whatever they were 242 I think and then we'll be doing a live stream today as well so make sure you check back for the stream it'll be mentioned earlier but it's at it's at 7 p.m. Eastern Time on the day this goes alive which is October 5th I don't know where to start with this we did like the card mods I got 1 cards on a riser I don't think that will impact performance too much but maybe a little bit and what we're working with here is a Strix 2080 TI and EVGA XE ultra 2080 TI i have bios mods that I got from XOC community from both of those and we've wrapped all this stuff so anything over the motherboard I should probably wrap a bit of this but it's wrapped in blue shop towel and part of that's free condensation part of its it's actually all for condensation and then we have the blocks and you'll see this in the build-up footage the blocks are like crazy wrapped up in blue shop towels Wade helped me out with some of that I have heat spreaders on the vram but my concern is that the shop towel will prevent a lot of the air from getting in as far as it needs to they're surrounded by that that eraser artist eraser so that will insulate them thermally and to solve that problem we put on a bunch of fans so that's the bench now it's time to fill it with ice and do some testing on it especially condensation testing so for this we're gonna just turn on everything in one second let make sure not doing this while my arms are still wet so we're going to turn on the fans there's an option to do dry ice later if we want to I just need some circulation over the bucket for co2 reasons because carbon dioxide so for the condensation test it's getting a lot I need to tape some of that down some more what we're gonna do is dump ice in there turn the fans on see if any condensation forms and so the shop towel has two purposes one is to stop air from hitting any metal surfaces while they are cold because we're dealing with ambient temperature air and sub ambient temperature in the loop so that's a big concern because if any air hits like a piece of metal forms condensation and then blows water-filled air around the bench it can definitely short something kill something so part one of the shop towel is to prevent the air from hitting things contrary to what you normally do part two is if there is condensation build-up it soaks it into the towel rather than dropping onto the bench and I also have some shop towels strategically placed under each card in case any drips down off of the tubing or the pump towards the PCIe slot so time to fill it with ice and see how this works in a couple 10 pound bags of ice buy more later and I'm gonna start with maybe half of one and see if condensation starts forming alright here we go the next move after this if we need to go up be dry ice at which point we'd have to add antifreeze and a piece of the loop but let's start with ice try not to splash too much okay now there's our starting point so for temperatures right now we're eating 11 degrees Celsius and that's for the loop temperature I believe and we're eating eight point eight degrees Celsius in the tank really what we need is more ice a lot of it's migrating and melted so that's gonna melt really fast I think we're gonna have to put a lot more ice in it at once to help preserve the ice and then close the lid to reduce the reduce some of the escape of the cold so let's buy more ice for that but our goal is still going to work which is testing for condensation so this point question is is there any I'm not seeing any I think I've got what I need I just need to see if it forms condensation now we're below ambient on a lot of the components because they're all attached the same power plan so this is the ice bucket and then the tube going up into the system the reservoir full of cold water these are our pumps which are a lot hotter yes and the rest of the system and then over here you can see the hub of one of the fans and then the cars themselves which are obviously below ambient just what we want yes and there's right in the middle there's the cold plate so the backside of the cold plate the backside of the GP is very cold right now which is why we why we did this test because it's it's insulated so it should be ok and really I should probably not have this be below ambient when we turn it on because the concern there is that everything's cold and it's gonna get hot very fast is everything plugged in so we should not have an external pump and make the same mistake Jay did so let's move this pump to the main power supply okay time to turn it on you ready you nervous okay that's good so we're good there I think the power cables plugged in it would appear so that should power the pump as well at this point the fans are going both pumps are going we don't even know if these cards like survived surgery yet so well we won't know if something goes wrong we won't know what it is all right so everything should be flashed now we're ten degrees loop temperature it's getting pretty warm now and nine degrees in the box that need to dump more ice in but we're just gonna validate everything all that stuff first make sure all the settings are right well actually first card is that 16 Celsius second tards at 15 Celsius so it's never probably good on those let's just run it window to anyway and see what what they look like when it's operating just to be safe CPU 49 50 but we're in a GPU test right now so 24 see the first card originally our EVGA card was at 66 during this test this was on air and we're at 30 on the ACS card might be pushing a little harder I don't know that's the first card in the loop so should be cold air but we're hitting 21 60 megahertz on the clock now we're up 2198 crashes so we still can't do that it might need to go colder for that or something we are at ten in the reservoir nine point nine in the reservoir seven point four in the cooler okay our MOSFETs are at 23 degrees on that side not the most accurate in the world but it's pretty accurate 33 for that fat 35 for that one we're good there I can't hit them I can hit the side of that memory module 28 that's a reflective and a missive surface that's not a good point to measure so our hottest memory module on that card is about 32 degrees so we're good even on the parts I was worried about why not just like fill it with the water that's already in there four degrees on the loop 2.6 on the cooler okay oh that's quite the improvement for us but we got to get up to Jay's score still start at 12,000 CPU score 15 3 34 with GPU so it works now I need to tune the graphics settings J has magical hybin parts now we just need to get our GPU memory up higher so let's just jump high to start and see what happens and the answers probably crash we might have some deficit from that riser card in there too but I'm not sure typically it's not very much if there is any it's passing as the RAM doing Ram is just fine there's a next graphic score 15,000 369 that's certainly better 15 3 6 9 and that's at 160 offset 980 for one card and 160 and 1064 the other let's keep pushing that memory definitely the clocks are way higher than before I'm overclocking more than previously 15,000 505 that's a big jump nice well we've beaten tear Bauer now up until the point he decides to try and considering he was cheeky and names his upload just a quick validation test so score just jumped up by 200 points for us which is major the overclock so I was using before or like significantly lower than they can be when the cards are 9 degrees so it's pushing like over clocks a lot higher now all right kick that under thank you okay it's too much water in there and we need to add more ice or emptying out some of the water this is gonna be kind of hard to stop it's gonna spray everywhere so you might want to ya know a button would have been better okay ready it's almost like we should stop it from the inside how would it feel like I get nice smartest thing we've ever done okay everyone wanted an ice cube in the reservoir that one time so we're getting pretty close to the scores we want without shunt mods I didn't have any on there for these tests I already applied the liquid metal to the ACS card in the front and now I'm gonna try and get in here and get on this EVGA card I've put a nail polish around it to try and minimize risk of shorting things but that inductors really close done this before with the efi card and it sucks just as much then i coated that entire inductor leg though and liquid metal as well so where's my good pedal in the help ah so that it doesn't get coated in the liquid metal and I've got a better way to do this with three milli ohm shunt resistors that I prefer to use but the problem is I would have to unbuild half the loop and you get the cards out and that's gonna suck so we're just going to liquid metal route for now and if I really need the extra power target we can take it all apart and do the soldering approach it's just that's a lot more work so alright that's pretty good on that one that's a lot so that'll that'll help us out with the resistance I need to do the backside now and that'll lift our power guard because we're still heading V rel power and SLI performance cap limits in gpu-z so power is easily resolved kind of alright so that'll work for our liquid metal application now we just boot it up check the power limit off to drop the offset on the clocks because there's more power now so it's gonna clock higher natively and our goal is to hit higher than 2200 5 megahertz consistently so that's it hope you enjoyed it definitely an interesting experiment for us and we'll be doing more of this we have some special products coming in to work on even lower temperatures but we're not sure what our plans are for that yet just make sure you subscribe to catch that go to store documents nexus net to support us directly because this kind of content turned out to be extremely time expensive to make and so if you want to help us out directly that's a good Avenue otherwise patreon.com slash gamers Nexus thank you for watching I'll see you all next time